Nectec develops freeware for network management

But this problem will soon be eliminated with the new free network-management software developed by a research team at the National Electronics and Computer Technology Centre (Nectec).

Last year, Nectec's research team from Networking Technology Lab initiated a project to develop the "Intelligent Network Management System" freeware. The software has been designed for organisations operating on the open-source Linux operating system to enable them to manage their LAN at a lower cost.

This three-year project is expected to finish next year. It is expected to include free software for network monitoring, network probe and bandwidth management.

Researcher Panita Pongpaibool said the team had customised two key software -- Nagios and NTop - for the Thai market.

Nagios is a host and service-monitoring system designed to alert the user of network problems while Ntop is a network-traffic probe that gives the status of the overall network usage.

Panita said the team conducted a survey and found that a large number of organisations, especially schools, had not yet adopted a network- management system.

The application, therefore, would help these organisations to manage and speed up their existing network.

She said the team started work on localising Ntop and customising its engine last year by developing an easy-to-use Thai graphic user interface. They also linked the program with a database so that administrators could keep a track of the network status for further analysis.

At present, Ntop has been distributed for a field test in some schools and the team plans to release a free Nectec version in the next three months.

In the mean time, the team is developing a localised version of Nagios with enhanced features.

 The new Thai version of Nagios, Panita said, will use graphical topology, provide a network-status report based on the services and equipment being used and alert administrators of problems through SMS or e-mail.

The team expects the beta version of Nagios to be released for a field test within the next few months.

In addition, the team is also developing its own Linusx-based bandwidth-management software to help network administrators control their inbound and outbound bandwidth usage. This system is expected to begin beta testing in March next year.

 

"We hope to test all of these systems in about 10 schools before making an official release," Panita said.

She said that as the new Intelligent Network Management System is freeware, it is suitable for use in small and medium organisations which have bandwidth of between 10 to 100 megabits per second. However, local open-source software developers can also use this application to begin with before upgrading to an enterprise-level software.